


still cannot find no peace

by bloomthefox



Series: the long winter [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, also buckynat if you squint and please do, im in hell, none of my work is ever beta'd, queerplatonic team america ya, tony is mostly background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 22:37:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1795741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloomthefox/pseuds/bloomthefox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The chase, and what comes after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	still cannot find no peace

**Author's Note:**

> this was very unplanned but the idea of steve wearing bucky's dog tags has been nagging at my mind since the first avenger,,,,, this is kind of rushed i wrote it really quick bcus i was supposed to be working on my novel but uh. it wouldn't go away until i wrote it  
> the next part will be about bucky's side of it but it might take me a while so please be patient gomen  
> i might do one about nat as well literally just as an excuse to write queerplatonic buckynat because don't speak to me  
> title is from fire escape by half moon run!!!! which i listened to on repeat while i wrote this so maybe go listen to that  
> (my tumblr is hawkatess)

He asks for a couple things back from the Smithsonian, after he gets used to life in the 21st century. A couple sketchbooks, photos of Bucky and the other Howling Commandos (but god if he remembers them being quite so yellow and faded, tearing easily around the edges), personal affects.  
He thinks someone must have seen him take them, because otherwise he’s certain there would’ve been a manhunt when they noticed an artifact missing (a flash of guilt in the fluorescent light of a back room, fingers wrapping around cold metal that has been scrubbed of rust). But he’s on the laptop Tony gave him, and the Smithsonian is doing an exhibit on Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, and Steve fingers the metal of Bucky’s dog tags, lifting them slightly from their place around his neck.

Natasha knows, not because he told her, but because she knows. She always does. Sam knows because they slipped out of his shirt after a run and Sam grabbed them to read the name and when he looked back up at Steve something terrible and big and sad flashed behind his eyes and neither of them said a word. He knows in more ways than one, Steve thinks. The same something flashes behind his eyes whenever Steve talks about finding Bucky, and still, neither of them says a word.

They run him down in a warehouse outside Berlin and he doesn’t try to hurt them until they try to touch him. He throws Steve against a wall and twists Sam’s arm until it almost snaps and looks up and his eyes are rimmed in red, like he’s tired or crying or both (a blurred memory of Bucky’s face when Steve was in bed for two days and never stopped coughing, _you look like a kicked puppy, Buck,_ and _I was just thinking of how screwed you’d be if I wasn’t around_ , numbers on the radio, _you’d be worse off without me and you know it_ ). He lets Sam go almost gently and backs off, knife held at the ready, never letting his guard down as he turns and bolts out the back door.

Natasha meets them at a café in St. Petersburg, wrapped in black furs, red hair a stark contrast against the monochrome backdrop of Russian winter, like blood spreading in the snow. She slides files across the table and sips her black espresso, steam drifting lazily in the air. Sam is not dressed anywhere near warm enough and Steve remembers, again, that she knows more about this than they do, understands it in a way they do not. She understands the side of Bucky that he missed while he was sleeping. Her gaze lingers for a moment on the glint of the cold chain around his neck (the silver resting against her own collarbone, a late quiet conversation, _I know what it’s like to be unmade_ ). Her expression remains unreadable.

The next time they catch up to him is in Brooklyn, or it seems like he catches up to them; there is a knife against Steve’s throat in the dark and a chill from the open window and Sam is still sleeping in the next room. The knife pulls away, still braced in the air between them, and Bucky presses one finger to Steve’s lips (fingers on lips, fingers then lips, sirens passing on the Brooklyn streets below, Steve’s small body under Bucky’s big hands). Bucky makes a noise in his throat that sounds like grinding metal and softens to a harsh whisper.  
“I am trying to remember,” he says, voice low and choked off somewhere in his chest.  
“Let me help you,” says Steve, not moving for fear of setting Bucky off again, choosing every word like his life depends on it. Like Bucky’s life depends on it.  
Bucky sits back onto the foot of Steve’s bed, draws his knees to his chest ( _you look like a kicked puppy_ ), swallows once, twice, stands.  
“I’m trying,” he says. “I’ll try.”  
He doesn’t close the window behind him. His dog tags feel heavy against Steve’s chest.

The next time is back in D.C., at the Smithsonian exhibit, and Bucky only flinches when Steve touches him gently on the shoulder, just above the place where metal collides with skin in scarred white whorls. He’s looking at one of the sketchbooks Steve let the museum keep, page after page of Bucky, charcoal shading the smooth lines of his shoulders, the angle of his neck. Steve thinks for a moment he should give Bucky the dog tags, if it’ll help him remember, but he’s selfish (always has been when it comes to Bucky) and he wants, no matter what, to have a piece of Bucky left to carry with him. Steve presses his fingers into Bucky’s palm instead, the metal cool against his hand.  
“That’s not me,” says Bucky, gesturing towards the sketchbook. “It looks like me. But it’s not. Not anymore.”  
“You’re still you,” says Steve quietly. “You’re still Bucky.”  
Bucky pulls his hand out of Steve’s and disappears into the crowd without a word.

It’s only after he turns himself in that Steve finds out he’s been living with Natasha. There’s no SHIELD anymore, so she brings him to Tony, and he sits limp on the table in nothing but a pair of black shorts, lets himself be moved, examined, tested. Steve wants to be angry, is angry, wants to yell at Natasha for keeping his best friend away from him. But he knows it was what Bucky needed (she understands this in a way he does not, she knows what it is to be unmade), so he crosses his arms and looks anywhere but her eyes.  
“How long?” he says, instead.  
“Two months,” she replies flatly, face a blank canvas, hair hanging red against her forehead.  
Steve sets his jaw and doesn’t respond.

Even after that Steve doesn’t see much of him; he spends a lot of time with Sam, working through trauma after trauma, latching onto the good memories when they come. Natasha goes on a trip somewhere, or a mission, gives him the number of a burner and tells him to call. He feels very alone, more than he has in months, and a part of him thinks this is worse than the searching, because Bucky is right there, and he can’t hold him ( _you’ve waited seventy years, Steve,_ he thinks), can’t do anything to help ( _you can wait a little longer_ ). And it’s months of that, agonizing months of so little contact and Bucky flinching whenever Steve moves to touch him ( _he barely speaks more than a word,_ he’d said to Sam, angry and scared and worried, and Sam had replied with _he’ll get there, give him time, he’ll get there_ ).

He does get there, slowly, and by the time Natasha comes back (with a different haircut and a new scar on her right arm), Bucky’s speaking in full sentences, and Steve swears he sees him smile when Tony cracks jokes.  
It takes them time, the two of them, and nights of Bucky waking up in a cold sweat because he doesn’t know where he is, when he is, _who_ he is (but he remembers Steve, always, even on the worst days), and days where he moves mechanically, following unknown orders, and doesn’t speak a word.  
“I’ll never be the same as you remember me,” he says, one night, quiet voice ringing loud in the quieter room.  
“I don’t care,” says Steve, earnest as he ever was. “You’re still you. I doubt I’m the same as you remember me.” He runs his fingers along the seam of metal and skin, rests his hand on the side of Bucky’s face.  
“I thought you were dead, Buck,” he confides. Bucky laughs, and it breaks into the darkness of the room, and catches his fingers on the chain of his dog tags hanging around Steve’s neck.  
“Yeah,” he says, rubbing the metal between finger and thumb. “I thought you were smaller.”


End file.
